The History of Roleplaying

A fairly complete, somewhat accurate and only slightly biased exposition of the hobby's turbulent existence, from its origins to the modern day. Serialised in nine parts.

Part VIII: Dark Times

At last, it was the 1990s. Thanks to the golden age of the
eighties, roleplaying had reached incredible heights, both as a
powerful young industry and a new form of creative expression. Nevertheless, as time went
on, things were beginning to stagnate. The super-powered cinematic
stylings were being copied ad nauseam and quality was dropping. A new
idea was needed to burst the industry's obsession with this glossy,
four-colour world. A world of darkness, perhaps...

The beginning of the "dark" movement in roleplaying begins a
bit further back, however. In 1984, William Gibson revolutionised
science fiction with Neuromancer and it did not take long for roleplaying games
to embrace this dark vision of the future. 1988 saw R.Talsorian Games'
Cyberpunk 2020, FASA's Shadowrun followed the next year and there were many
others. Shadowrun was particularly inventive, seamlessly adding
fantasy trappings
like magic, elves and dragons to the futuristic world.
Shadowrun's dice
pooling system leant towards more cinematic action and more
powerful
characters, a fact that probably explains much of its
greater success.
Thanks to a steady stream of high-quality support, Shadowrun
has
effectively outlasted most of its competitors and the third
edition was
released last year.

Special note should also go to GURPS CyperPunk, which,
legends say, was
confiscated in a Secret Service raid on the GURPS office,
because it was
thought to be "a handbook for computer crime". The truth is
that the raid
was prompted by an investigation on the private actions of
one of their
employees. No evidence was found, but the Secret
Service operatives still confiscated many documents, files, even whole computers, which caused grave financial problems for SJG. When going through all this material, the Cyberpunk manuscript caught their attention and misunderstood. For reasons unknown - but perhaps to have some excuse for the original raid - the book attracted a lot of criticism, including the above crime, and the SS did try to suppress its release later on. However, this is most likely due to bureaucratic inertia than any real belief in the game's nefarious potential.

Cyberpunk soon inspired Steampunk, which shifts the same
dark themes to a
world of Victorian Europe, with an out-of-control and much
further advanced
industrial revolution replacing the computer revolution of
its modern
cousin. Again, RPGs were quick to follow, although not in
quite as many
numbers. Probably the best example of Steampunk is the very
gritty Space:
1889. Those enamoured of the more picaresque aspects of
Victorianism were
provided with Castle Falkenstein. This, like Shadowrun,
added magic to the
mix featuring some charming card-based mechanics and a
clever
character generation system that begins with developing a
diary for your
character.

Both cyberpunk and steampunk games have oscillated in
popularity ever
since but have never really risen above niche genres. They
have, however, paved the
way for a whole new type of gaming.

At GenCon in 1991, Mark Rein-Hagen unveiled a game that
changed the hobby
forever, and a company that would get rich from it. The
game was Vampire:
The Masquerade and the company was White Wolf. Rein-Hagen
had previously
worked on Ars Magica and he brought some of his impressive
ideas of epic
story telling to this game. However Vampire was much more
than that. It
captured the unearthly horror of Cthulhu, the gritty,
paranoid, dark edge
of cyberpunk, plus it featured super-powered unearthly
heroes which were
still the popular trend. What's more, it tapped directly
into the Gothic
subculture.

Arriving when things like The Crow, Interview with a Vampire
and The Dark Knight Returns were pushing Gothic media into the
limelight, Vampire caught a wave of popularity and rode it all the way. It was
quickly very popular across the hobby, but was even more impressive to outsiders.
Because it was directly drawn from a burgeoning new culture, Vampire
drew more new players to the hobby than even Star Wars had done.

Vampire was so popular it inspired four thematically similar
copies:
Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The
Oblivion and
Changeling: The Dreaming; all of which make up the "World of
Darkness".
Each of these games matched Vampire in their dark dramatic
edge, and in
their incredibly deep settings. These games also produced a
huge amount of
supplements, looking at the character types, identities,
settings, internal
politics, history and ethos of each game. Only AD&D (and possibly GURPS) can
claim to have more
support material.

Vampire can also claim something else that previously only AD&D could: the
two are the only RPGs to have inspired television shows. D&D, of course, produced the
horrendously childish Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series.
Vampire, on the other hand, inspired the Spelling studios' prime time,
high-gloss Melrose Place-esque "Kindred: The Embraced". Despite its more
mature approach, it was as badly done as the cartoon and the reaction was
exactly the same
from gamers: they hated it. The show was cancelled after
only a handful of
episodes. However, the fact that the idea existed at all
proves how
incredibly popular and marketable Vampire had become and how
its
connection with the Gothic subculture had catapulted
roleplaying somewhat
into the mainstream. It was an important step in the
history of the hobby.

Vampire has also opened up a whole new arena for
roleplaying. Before
Vampire, roleplaying genres could be divided into fantasy,
science fiction,
superhero, and a tiny fraction devoted to horror. After
Vampire, "gothic
punk" was forever part of that list. After the success of
the WoD games
was witnessed, companies fell over themselves to get into
the act. Games
like Witchcraft, Nephilim, In Nomine, Nightbane, Warlock,
Immortal,
Armageddon, Trinity, The Everlasting, The Whispering Vault
and lately,
Unknown Armies, all owe something to Vampire. Of course, Vampire also owes a lot to its darkly horrific forerunners like Chill, Kult and Blood.

It wasn't just Vampire's setting that was popular. Possibly
Vampire's
greatest contribution to the hobby (and yet, also its most
destructive, as
we shall see later) was that its popularity encouraged many
to copy its
rules and style as well as its setting. This caused another
minor
revolution in the hobby. Vampire's rules were ingenious,
elegant and
fairly simple (apart from the convoluted combat system),
with everything
astutely tailored to producing a strong atmosphere and an
affecting game.
Vampire was reminiscent of the earlier Pendragon in its
bringing of pathos
and emotion to its characters and its stories. Vampire also
furthered Ars
Magica's concentration on deep and lengthy character play.
What really set
it apart was the hugely detailed background material, to
rival that
of Tekumel or Glorantha, and for the first time, this was more important
than the rules.

None of these ideas was revolutionary on their own, but
being presented in
this slick, highly marketable package made these ideas take
off like
wildfire. Games with confused, over complex or poorly
realised rules and
concepts were no longer tolerated. Likewise, for a game to
sell, its
production values had to be professional: writing, editing,
layout, and
most especially, artwork became forefront considerations.
Such things had
once been incidental, with early rulebooks often all but
trading on their
incomprehensibility.

However, this emphasis on style over substance had the
natural effect of
reducing substance somewhat. The World of Darkness games
are particularly
guilty of this; while every book of theirs is a work of
visual art, this is
often not matched with equal attention to quality in the
actual content and
rules.

Another criticism directed at these games is their devotion
to setting.
Again, this is an area in which they excel. The World of
Darkness is an
incredibly evocative world, rich with detail and dramatic
power, from which
infinitely many powerful stories can be constructed.
However, just like
Barker's Tekumel or Stafford's Glorantha, it is its very
evocativeness that
restricts it. To play the game properly requires a complete
immersion in
the paradigm and argot of this alien world, something not
easy and
unattractive for beginners. White Wolf provided for this
somewhat with a
great deal of source material, but this has also made things
worse as these
copious new lines have only deepened the complexities of the
setting.

On its own, these flaws would not be a problem, but as these
ideas have
spread through an industry anxious to copy White Wolf's
successes, they
have become standards. Vampire has given us the age of the
setting, an age
very much still with us. Once, games all had the same
setting, and the
style of the rules was all that matters. After Vampire, a
game will not
sell unless it has a deep and evocative setting. A setting
full of complex
political interplay and powerful mythic sensibilities, one
that can be
presented with suitably impressive artistic stylings, and
most importantly,
one that is going to produce endless sourcebooks to explain
all of it.

While this age has produced some incredible new worlds and
has furthered
greatly some aspects of RPG design, it has also been
somewhat destructive
to the pursuit of better system design and to the industry
in general.
The idea that gaming has to be of this style marginalised
other styles.
However, an even greater maginalisation came from another of
White Wolf's
emphases.

Vampire brought in an era of "serious" gaming. Flowing
naturally from the
devotion required to properly evoke the setting was the idea
that
roleplaying should be a form of collaborative art, with the
players and the
GM creating a story, told to someone not present. Again,
this was a
fabulous idea that opened roleplaying up onto a whole new
level. But
again, as it was copied, it caused problems because it
became accepted as
the only way to roleplay. RPGs were judged purely on their
dramatic
storytelling potential, hack-and-slash gaming became a
derogatory term.

What was worse was that White Wolf made it overtly clear
that they thoroughly believed
this idea. A sense of superiority, even arrogance, came
from their
products, issuing ludicrous claims of elevating all RPGs from childishness
and of saving
the hobby from itself. This created a huge backlash against
White Wolf by
those who didn't happen to agree. The catch-cry was that
games were meant
to be fun, not serious. White Wolf then took the position
of evil empire
away from TSR, becoming the target for countless parodies
and insults.

This backlash led to a new movement in game design, with
gamers looking
back to the simplistic fun of butt-kicking that was so popular
in the
eighties. The cry for simplicity did not just extend to the
setting,
however. In an attempt to divulge all nuances of depth and
complexity, a
new wave of rules-light games hit the market. In the
eighties, the popular
mode was great tomes full of complex rules covering every
possible aspect
of combat. Now, what mattered was quick and dirty rules
that allowed
players to forget their calculators and get back to mowing
down mooks and
punks.

For the action movie freaks, we had the clever Hong Kong
Action Theatre and
the gung-ho Extreme Vengeance. Anime inspirations gave us
Bubblegum Crisis
and Big Eyes, Small Mouth. The classic superhero game
Champions was
stripped down to use the simpler Fuzion system. GURPS also
issued a "lite"
version of its rules, and other companies followed. But the
king of all
the four-colour action games was and is Feng Shui.
Developed by Robin D.
Laws, this has a system that is both simple yet robust. It
perfectly
captures the atmosphere of Asian action movies, going out of
its way to
encourage players to do death-defying stunts. Also, it
provides a well
thought-out background which has enough depth to maintain
campaign play,
something very few action games can boast.

Wargame crossovers came back in too, with titles such as
Heavy Gear and
Warzone getting the mix just right. We also had the
brilliant satire games
of HOL and Macho Women with Guns. These pointedly
celebrated the
hack-and-slash mindset and poked fun at RPG rules in
general. They were
the more violent equivalent of Toon, stripping away
everything accepted
about gaming and getting back to killing things. Although
only recently
very popular, Jolly Blackburn's comic strip "Knights of the
Dinner Table",
which similarly celebrate this style of play, also arose in
this era.

Another game that stripped away the rules was Over the Edge.
Set on a
psycho-surreal island where every conspiracy theory possible
is true, a
free-form rules system is a necessity. OTE thus threw almost
all the rules
out the window, with players making up their characters stat
names and
skills to fit whomever they wanted to be. This idea is
closer to the new
trend in "metagmes" - design engines rather than complete
rules - of which
the most notable is the revolutionary FUDGE (Freeform
Universal
Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine).

The new Unknown Armies is a perfect expression of the hobby as it is now, as a result of these two movements. It combines the dark, "mature" and complex background of Vampire with the four-colour Hollywood action of Feng Shui, and similarly tries to blend dramatic storytelling with plenty of gunplay and furious fistfights. It also adds the fluid rules of Over the Edge, throws in some of the cleverness of Call of Cthulhu, along with its own unique setting and rules. Though undenibaly original, it is also very obviously a product of the times, the culmination of all the persistent trends.

Inevitably, this "fun" attitude became as equally narrowed
and emphatic as
its inspiration, and hence equally as destructive. For the
first time, the
hobby became divided into two distinct cliques, each of
which hated the
other. And so when the hobby seemed to be going down
forever, and a new
competitor moved in, each was quick to blame the other.
We'll look at this
more in the (definitely this time) final chapter.

Gaming had also done a complete circle. In the eighties,
the complex,
rules-heavy games had been those most concerned with
superheroic hack and
slash fun. While the more cerebral and serious games were
throwing away
complexity and rules as the antithesis of dramatic roleplay.
This past
reversal proves the short-sightedness of this modern
division. And yet the
hobby continues to too often follow trends, cloning
successful innovations
ad nauseam and constricting creativity and exploration.
These ideas
continue to determine the directions of the industry, with a
game's format
being proscribed solely by the marketing niche it has to fill.

The truth is that form, style and system are as much a
matter of personal
taste as setting. Even the very purpose and nature of
roleplaying games is
so varying as to be practically indefinable. Whether we
engage in
wargame-esque orc-killing dungeon crawls, or try to create a "mature" and dark story-telling forum, or anywhere in between, we're still
roleplaying. There
are a million ways to play, and no one form is in any way
superior to
others.

Roleplaying is an amazing idea, and it can't be put
into little boxes
or measured against an arbitrary standard. And for that
matter, neither can gamers.